First previews of Office 2008 are sneaking out of Redmond today with some great looking screenshots of everyone’s favorite office suite — after the ink pen and notebook, obviously. I’ve tried a number of competing suites, including Pages and Numbers from Apple, and I keep coming back to Word and Excel. It seems they’ve pulled out the Visual Basic scripting and stuck in more Automator and Applescript functionality and are trying to compete more actively in the DTP space with the layout tools.

It looks like they’ve also started using the “ribbon” motif found on the new Office for PCs, which is a nice change. More info as we get our review copy.

First Look: Word 2008 [MacWorld]